Storysmith, 236 North Street, Bristol, BS3 1JD

Thursday 16th April, 6.30pm (6.15pm doors)

Our prayers have been answered: Gwendoline Riley will be coming to the shop to talk about her new novel The Palm House!

We are honoured to welcome the author of peerless novels like My Phantoms and First Love to Bristol, and honestly relieved to tell you that The Palm House is right up there with her best work – emotionally exacting, uncomfortably funny, devastatingly plausible – but somehow it’s also a media satire and an ode to city life, told in impossibly efficient prose.

Pre-order your copy of The Palm House (rrp £16.99) for a special discounted price with your ticket, then collect on the night!

About Gwendoline Riley

Gwendoline Riley was born in London in 1979. She is the author of My Phantoms, which was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize; of First Love, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Gordon Burn Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for fiction; and of Cold Water, Sick Notes, Joshua Spassky, and Opposed Positions. She has also won a Betty Trask Award and a Somerset Maugham Award, and has been shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. In 2018, The Times Literary Supplement named her as one of the twenty best British and Irish novelists working today.

Photo credit: Susannah Baker Smith

About The Palm House

From the Women’s Prize-shortlisted author of First Love

‘I love this book’ Sarah Perry

‘Outstandingly brilliant’ Claire-Louise Bennett

Laura Miller and Edmund Putnam have been friends for a long time. Theirs is a happy meeting of minds, with long evenings spent huddled in an ancient pub by the Thames, where they share office gossip, reflect on their teenage passions, and lament the state of the world.

Recently, though, Putnam has been harder to reach: he has lost his father, and the magazine to which he has dedicated his life has been hijacked by an insufferable new editor, Simon ‘call me Shove’ Halfpenny.

Laura has her own problems: with a prickly mother and a tricky past, and in a beautiful and indifferent city, her day-to-day life is precarious. But as Putnam starts to sink into despondency, she must try to bring him back.

A novel of enduring friendships and small mercies, The Palm House offers us Gwendoline Riley’s trademark keen observation and wit, and leaves us – somehow – with a curious sense of possibility.

PRAISE FOR GWENDOLINE RILEY

‘Riley’s prose is so electric, so alive with humour and insight and passion, that by the end you will want to stand up and cheer’ – Paul Murray, author of The Bee Sting

‘Gwendoline Riley is a genius’ – Evening Standard

‘So painful, so funny and acutely observed’ – David Nicholls, author of You Are Here

‘A writer of singular vision’ – The Guardian

For venue access info, head to storysmithbooks.com/access .